"Turning a New Leaf," the afternoon symposium on inauguration day,
is a program that both celebrates the inauguration of President Lee
C. Bollinger and uses the occasion of his installation to inaugurate
YoHA (Year of Humanities and Arts) at the University, according to
Julie Ellison, associate vice president for research, professor of
English, a member of the Inauguration Planning Committee and YoHA
director.

The symposium title, Ellison notes, "evokes both turning the page
of a book and a change of season. The idea of the leaf as a page
turned by a reader is particularly appropriate, since faculty artist
Ted Ramsay is creating hand-make inaugural books."

The symposium features scholarly, historical, artistic and
performance presentations celebrating the richness of intellect and
creativity at the University. According to Ellison "faculty
presentations, a series of 'vignettes' of faculty work, will be
alternated with brief introductions to YoHA programs, so that by the
end of the program the University's wealth of talent in the area of
the arts and humanities and the experimental new programs being tried
in the arts and humanities this year will all have been previewed."

"Emerson has a word for what eloquence should be," she adds. "He
calls it a 'panharmonicon,' so I think of this program as a
'panharmonicon' of what is possible in the arts and humanities.
Indeed, YoHA itself is kind of a 'panharmonicon' of collaborations."

Faculty presenters are:

Kenrick Ian Grandison, assistant professor, School of Natural
Resources and Environment, who will discuss his study of land use and
campus design at historically Black colleges, focusing on Tuskegee
Institute.

Yau Ching, a lecturer in the Program in Film and Video Studies and
video artist, who will present a new work, a personal meditation on
language and identity during the turnover of Hong Kong from the
United Kingdom to China.

June Howard, associate professor of English, of American culture
and of women's studies, who will discuss American literary markets
and "publishing the family" at the turn of the century.

Michael Daugherty, association professor of music-composition, who
will present and discuss selections from his opera, "Jackie O."

James Cogswell and Peter Sparling will present a video on and
discuss their collaborative dance and multimedia performance
"Enigmas" project, which is being presented Sept. 13 at the Power
Center. Cogswell is associate professor, School of Art and Design.
Sparling is associate professor of dance and of music and chair of
the Department of Dance.

Among the YoHA programs to be highlighted during the symposium
are:

The YoHA Celebration Minigrant Program makes grants available to
existing student organizations and to groups of students that form
around new projects in the arts and humanities. Funds will support
student-initiated publications, art works, panel discussions and
performances that take shape outside the classroom.

A special subscriptions series, "Spacing Out," co-sponsored by the
University Musical Society. Each performance in the series, Ellison
says, "will be part of what we call a 'surround sound'
experience-sound surrounded by art exhibits, lectures and symposia,
films and other participatory programs."

The YoHA Course Community, supported by funds from the Office of
the President, makes minigrants available to faculty who incorporate
arts and humanities content in their courses. Some 20 courses are
being supported in such fields as art history, photography,
mathematics, Asian languages, nursing, medicine, physics and theater.

YoHA, which is formally sponsored by the Office of the Vice
President for Research, is as much an organizing tool as it is a
series of events. Its goals include celebrating scholarship,
performance and creativity in the humanities and arts; encouraging
new partnerships among faculty and students working in these fields;
and strengthening the community of learners in the arts and
humanities.

Yau Ching, lecturer in the Program in Film and Video
Studies, was born in Hong Kong and studies comparative literature and
philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, media studies at the New
School for Social Research in New York, and has worked
internationally as a film/video-maker, writer and educator. She has
taught at the University of California, San Diego; University of
California, Irvine; California Institute of the Arts, the School of
Visual Arts in New York. Her past film/video works include Flow, The
Ideal/Narrration, Video Letters 1-3 and Is There Anything Specific
You Want Me to Tell You About? Her book, Building a New Stove (Hong
Kong 1996) is a collection of her critical writings and fiction. Her
U-M honors have included a Faculty Award for Research Projects,
Office of the Vice Provost; Lecturers' Professional Development
Award; and a Faculty Award for Research and Creative Projects from
the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic and Multicultural
Affairs.

James A. Cogswell Jr., associate professor of art, was born
and raised in Japan as the child of missionary parents. He graduated
in English literature from Rhodes College and holds an M.F.A. from
the University of New Mexico. He also studied at the University of
Hong Kong. He became seriously involved in the daily practice of
painting in 1971 in Japan. His work has celebrated the form and
language of the human body in a variety of media. Recent prints,
drawings and paintings of an anthropomorphic alphabet have adapted
his figurative interests to phonetic signs. As sets of images, these
works have fed his interest in the sequential structures and gridded
visual fields that are at the heart of the Enigmas Project. He was
the Charles P. Brauer Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the
Humanities in 1992-93. He has received grants from the Office of the
Vice President for Research and the Horace H. Rackham School of
Graduate Studies and twice received Research Partnership grants for
collaborative projects working with graduate printmakers. His work
has been exhibited by commercial galleries in Houston, Dallas, Los
Angeles, Denver, Jacksonville and Detroit.

Michael Daugherty, associate professor of
music-composition, has created a niche in the music world that is
uniquely his own, composing concert music inspired by American
popular culture. His compositions include the Metropolis Symphony and
Bizarro, a homage to the Superman comics, recorded by David Zinman
and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. His American icon series
includes Le Tombeau de Liberace, a piano concertino; Dead Elvis, a
chamber ensemble work; and Desi, for symphonic winds . His music has
been performed by prominent orchestras and ensembles in the United
States and abroad, including performances of the BBC and Melbourne
Symphony Orchestras, the Philharmonia Orchestra (London), the
Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, the Ensemble InterContemporain, London
Sinfonietta and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble. He has received awards
and recognition from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the
National Endowment for the Arts.

Kenrick Ian Grandison, assistant professor of landscape
architecture, has published several articles examining how the built
environment of historically Black colleges and universities in
America reflects the historical relationship between race and the
landscape. They have appeared in such venues as Landscape Journal and
in The Geography of Identity, the fifth volume of the Institute for
the Humanities Ratio series. He currently is working on a book titled
Landscapes from the Bottoms: The Black College Campus as Cultural
History. Related to his research, since 1996 he has been helping the
Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site on the Tuskegee University
campus to develop an interpretative program. He holds a master's in
landscape architecture from the U-M.

June Howard is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, recognizing
outstanding contributions to undergraduate education, and associate
professor of English, of women's studies and of American culture. She
joined the U-M in 1979 after teaching at the University of
California, San Diego. Her research and teaching interests focus on
late 19th- and early 20th-century literature and culture in the
United States, literary genres, cultural theory, American studies and
women's studies. Her work-in-progress includes a manuscript titled
"Publishing the Family" and "What Is Sentimentality? And The Nature
of Interdisciplinarity: Notes by a Disestablishmentarian." She
currently is a member of the Department of English Executive
Committee, chair of the American Culture Graduate Committee and a
member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for Research on
Women and Gender. Her U-M honors include the Faculty Recognition
Award, LS&A Excellence in Education Award, Humanities Institute
Faculty Fellowship, U-M Collegiate Fellowship and Amoco Foundation
Good Teaching Award.

Peter Sparling, professor of dance and artistic director
of Dance Gallery/Peter Sparling & Co., an Ann Arbor-based dance
company, is a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and the Juilliard
School. He was a member of the Jose Limon Dance Company and a
principal dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company for 12 years.
Between 1979 and 1983, he presented Solo Flight and Peter Sparling
Dance Company for five successive seasons at New Your City's
Riverside Dance Festival. He has held residencies at numerous
American universities and at the London Contemporary Dance Theatre,
Australia's Victorian College of the Arts, Portugal's Ballet
Gulbenkian, Taiwan's Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, the Bat-Dor Summer
Dance Workshop and at the American Dance Festival. He has received
awards from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts,
Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, Arts Foundation of
Michigan and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. He was
a 1996-97 Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities.

The YoHA symposium also will feature the launching of "The Arts of
Citizenship," an innovative collaborative program of the U-M and city
of Ann Arbor that includes a lecture series, a design project and an
emerging collaboration with teachers at Mack Elementary and Community
High schools. Mayor Ingrid Sheldon, who is an honorary co-chair of
the YoHA Community Advisory Board, will make brief remarks at the
start of the symposium. David Scobey, assistant professor of history
and of American culture, is director of "The Arts of Citizenship"
initiative.

The lecture series will present speakers on public culture, public
history and public design. The speakers, says YoHA director Julie
Ellison, "will be informants, inspirers and conversational partners
in helping us think together about issues of cultural growth and
urban change in Ann Arbor." Confirmed speakers include Dwight
Pitcaithley, chief historian of the National Park Service, and former
poet laureate Robert Hass.

The focus of the design project, "The Broadway Bridges Project:
Cultural Programs for a Changing City," was suggested by Ann Arbor
Mayor Ingrid Sheldon. A team led by Scobey that is participating in
the project, which incorporates the areas near the planned
reconstruction of the Broadway Bridges. The group hopes to work with
city comittee and other community partners to suggest ways of
dramatizing the rich historical and cultural geography of this
complex intersection of river, parks, paths, streets, railroads,
businesses, industries and homes. The team also sees its role as that
of imagining the cultural programs that could occur on or near this
location and of encouraging design choices that will make those
programs feasible."

Planning is under way for a one-week summer seminar, "Students on
Site," involving U-M faculty and Ann Arbor public school teachers.
The group will seek to identify a workable series of
writing-intensive and humanities projects linked to the Broadway
Bridges site, to be done by public school students. The projects
"will address the development of primary-school writing skills
through the historical exploration of a specific locale," Ellison
says. Collaborating faculty and teachers will try to find ways for
high school students to serve as field trip partners, co-authors and
researchers.

"When the bridges have been reconstructed and the site is
available for cultural programming, student projects might take the
form of historical exhibits, storytelling and murals incorporating
texts and images," she adds.